Tuesday, October 11, 2016

A Storm Raging Through My Frozen Heart Tonight

It all seems so unreal now. The way we started. The way we ended. It was all make believe. I pretended you were perfect though I knew you were not.

I was hiding from my own pain and I didn't want to face being alone. She left and she took with her the colours of the sky, the rainbow in my eye, my heart's ease, my heart's delight.

She left and I stepped out of my cocoon and found the world cold and blaring and full of jagged little edges that surprised me, that cut me, that hurt.

I shouldn't have stepped out of my cocoon but how could I help it when she was the body that surrounded me, enveloped me, protected me from the world. In her arms, I was always safe. In her eyes, I was a real person, not a shadow.

I mattered.

And then I didn't. Her eyes grew cold. Her arms didn't encircle so much as push me away.

I tried to grab hold but further and further I went. There was no stopping this downward spiral. I was desperate. I tried everything. But the more I did, the further she seemed.

And one day she turned to me, sadness in her eyes, regret.

And I knew it was over.

We waited in the spaces between breaths. No one wanted to say it first. Words can be so final. We leave them unspoken hoping we'll never have to speak them. Hoping things will change. Hoping we'll wake up tomorrow and everything will be all right.

But in that space between breaths, I felt something tearing. I heard someone weeping. Maybe it was me. I felt myself falling, scrambling for a handhold on the sheer rock face but there was none.

And so I fell. I fell. I kept falling.

Help me, I screamed. Somebody save me, I screamed.

There was only silence. When the only one who loves you ceases to love you, there is only silence. And it is deafening.

I wanted to wrap my arms around her. I wanted to weep on her skin. But I knew she was freezing. I knew she would look through me, with that look in her eyes. I felt her contempt sear my eyelids and then... I felt my heart ice over.

It was the only way to arrest the free fall. It was the only way not to smash on the rocks. It was the only way to survive.

Sometimes I wish I had just allowed myself to keep falling. However long it took; a year or two or maybe 10. I could have dealt with it. One hour at a time, breathed through the pain, allowed it to wash over, allowed myself to cry, though not in public, allowed myself to completely unravel.

And then, when I was done falling apart, I could sort through the debris, the detritus of me, and slowly, excruciatingly, put myself together again.

Pain would be better than this nothing I feel now. Pain would be better than frozen.

April may be the cruelest month but I'm not going to thaw anytime soon.

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About Me

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. (CS Lewis)